Well, that decision didn’t last too long, as Minaj reactivated her account yesterday. In the process, however, she lost an awful lot of followers – her current tally is about 10 million short.

Minaj recently appeared on the UK’s The Graham Norton Show, where she promised her fans that she would return to Twitter.

“I had 11 million followers and I hope they will wait for me,” she told Norton. “I don’t know yet, I’m thinking about it. I miss my Barbz, please bear with me.”

It appears that the majority of those fans did not wait, as Minaj’s current Twitter tally is just 1,781,745.

This interests me for a couple of reasons. At the time of the deletion, it was speculated that if Minaj was to return to Twitter her account would be simply reactivated. In other words, it wasn’t deleted at all, but held in some kind of limbo, waiting for her return.

However, given the mass-unfollowing that has taken place in such a short space of time, this doesn’t make sense. Take a look at this chart from Twittercounter:

The consistent drop over the 10 days between April 14 and yesterday is a daily average that Twittercounter has assigned to explain Minaj’s absence and the massive difference in followers between the two data points, but everything about this is weird. According to Twittercounter, Minaj returned to Twitter yesterday with 1,242,342 followers, but that’s an end-of-day total, and I’m wondering if she actually returned to Twitter with a big, fat zero.

That is, her account was, actually and positively, deleted. For reals. And her total now represents followers since her return.

That, or Twitter arbitrarily decided to wipe out 90 percent of her network. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which of these options is less crazy.

In all honesty, I couldn’t give two hoots about Minaj being on this planet Twitter or not, but what has happened to her profile has piqued my curiosity. Nicki has yet to tweet since her return, and she’s unlikely to speculate on the huge decline in her follower numbers, embarrassing as this episode already was. And maybe Twitter will step in and fix her up, right as rain. But, until then, we’ll just have to scratch our heads and look at her all funny, as it’s more than a bit odd.